1. Technical Field
This invention relates to the field of resource management, and more particularly, to interfacing network management systems with management agents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Management agents serve as an interface providing a layer of isolation between management systems and managed resources such as business applications, devices, or software implementations of services or policies. Management agents can be implemented using resource management extensions to programming languages. Accordingly, to manage resources via a particular resource management extension architecture, the resource must be enabled in accordance with the specification of the management agent with which the resource is to communicate.
Although resource management extensions exist for various programming languages, one example of a resource management extension architecture is the Java Management Extension (JMX) architecture. JMX®, defined in the JMX specification, defines an architecture, design patterns, application programming interfaces (APIs), and services for application and network management using the Java programming language. The JMX specification is a set of specifications and development tools for managing Java environments and building management solutions. The JMX specification, which is incorporated herein by reference, has been defined in the document Java Management Extensions Instrumentation and Agent Specification, v1.1 (March 2002), published by Sun Microsystems, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.
Although resource management extension architectures continue to gain favor as industry standards, a limited number of such architectures are in operation. Many legacy systems, for example Unix-based products, rely upon Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Presently, no standardized solution exists to provide interoperability between resource management solutions such as JMX and legacy systems using SNMP. In consequence, there is no way to provide a unified management console view of a mixed SNMP legacy and resource management extension-enabled management agent without making significant modifications to the management agent.
Conventional interface solutions between legacy SNMP systems and management agents typically have been implemented as standalone systems which are not integrated into the management agent. As such, the standalone solutions cannot take advantage of the full range of features provided by the management agent. For example, standalone solutions cannot take advantage of notifications.
Another disadvantage of conventional interface solutions is that significant recoding and/or rebuilding of portions of the management agent is required. That is, to implement a conventional interface, developers must re-build managed objects of the management agent using tools provided by the solution package to ensure that the resulting managed objects have the requisite knowledge of the SNMP management system. To provide another example, conventional solutions for interfacing a JMX management agent with a SNMP system require developers to generate the managed objects or MBeans using a tool provided by the interface solution so that the resulting MBeans have knowledge of the SNMP system.
Such conventional solutions are implemented from the perspective of the SNMP system rather than from the perspective of the management agent. As a result, conventional solutions cannot be applied to existing resource management extension-enabled products, such as JMX-enabled products, without rebuilding and/or recoding the software management components of the management agent.